Sisters of Heart and Snow

by Margaret Dilloway

  Besides, Drew had never been as close to Hikari as Rachel had been. Drew figured she’d been the boy her father never had—they gave her this unisex name, after her father’s father, Andrew—and Killian generally gave Drew whatever she wanted. Maybe her mother had allied more with Rachel as a result.

  Drew kept busy in school, with music lessons, gone from before dawn until late at night, and that had seemed to be fine with Hikari. After Rachel got kicked out, Hikari became more withdrawn from the family. Further away from Drew. Instead, her mother spent most of her days sewing in that room downstairs.

  “How many quilts can a person make?” Drew asked her mother once, when she was twelve. No one else was home. She felt a vague irritation, seeing her mother so involved in the task. Not involved with her. She stood in the doorway, watching Hikari piece together a crazy quilt. “I mean, we’re in California.”

  Her mother hadn’t even looked up from the sewing machine. “It is for the process, Drew.” She heaved a sigh. “Go someplace else. If you can’t find something to do, then practice your music.”

  Drew didn’t understand what her mother meant by the “process.” She knew only that her mother preferred the company of her buzzing sewing machine to Drew’s chatter. Drew didn’t want to be alone, playing her viola. She watched her mother sew for another minute.

  Hikari stood up, obviously struggling to be patient. “Do you need something?”

  Drew shook her head.

  “Then go.” Hikari shut the door in her daughter’s face.

  Drew paused, listening to the machine start up again. She banged on the door. “I hope those quilts keep you warm, when you’re old and alone,” she yelled. Her mother hadn’t even slowed down the machine. Quite possibly, she hadn’t heard.

  Still, it wasn’t the nicest thing a girl has ever said to her mother. She was acting like Killian, petulant, selfishly angry at the loss of attention.

  Drew shakes off the memory.

  She pulls up in front of Rachel’s house. Rachel lives in a split-level on a hill, with a partial view of Lake Murray. Like all the lakes in San Diego, this is a water reservoir—you can take out slow speedboats or fish from the shores, but not swim. They call it a lake, Drew thinks, looking at the low water level, but it’s more like a really big pond. People who live by, say, a really big body of water, like Lake Michigan, would be disappointed.

  Rachel and Tom bought this house right after they were married. It’s a nice area. Homes built in the 1970s, remodeled and restuccoed and sometimes knocked down and rebuilt. Middle class. Far beyond what Drew can afford in her foreseeable lifetime.

  What happened was this: Rachel got knocked up when she was just eighteen, and both of them quit school, so his parents used Tom’s college money for the down payment. Tom’s a contractor, employed at the company his father started; and it’s a case of the shoemaker’s kids having no shoes—the house still needs a fair amount of fixing up. The stucco’s peeling off and the deck surrounding the house needs to be sanded and stained. Every time Drew visits, Rachel complains about the house, about its various leaks and cracks and termites. It’s annoying, Drew thinks. Like somebody complaining about their secure job to someone who’s been unemployed for years.

  Drew locks the car, following her sister in through the garage, passing through the laundry area. “Sorry the kitchen’s a mess,” Rachel calls over her shoulder. FRESH LINENS, a Pottery Barn–type sign proclaims in antique cream. The washer and dryer are cherry red, pristinely clean, with a deep spotless white sink on one side and a white Formica counter on which to fold laundry on the other. Drew, having spent most of her adult life doing laundry in laundromats, is impressed with her sister’s attention to tiny details. If Drew ever owns a house, she decides, not a word of complaint about anything, ever, will cross her lips.

  Seeing Rachel makes Drew look back on her missed opportunities. Most of the people Drew counted as financially successful now had partnered up early, gotten responsible jobs, and bought a house before the prices shot up out of reach. Or they’d struggled in their twenties, or had a lucky break that let them climb up out of their debt hole. When she was younger, Drew hadn’t understood how difficult it could be to attain middle-class-dom. How fast opportunities slipped away.

  But Drew also remembers Rachel encouraging her after she finished college and she was thinking about joining Out Stealing Horses. “I just don’t know if I can do it,” Drew had said. “What if they make me play the tambourine forever and ever?” It was Thanksgiving, and Drew had stopped by to give the kids matching stuffed turkeys that squawked. (Thanks, Rachel said in her cool, polite voice, and Drew knew she’d made a mistake with the noisy toys.) Her parents were taking her out to dinner. “Besides, I see people more talented than I am every day.”

  Rachel sighed impatiently. She stood at her kitchen counter—then a broken yellow Formica—mashing potatoes for dinner in a big ceramic bowl with what looked like an entire package of butter. Both toddler Chase and little girl Quincy clung to her legs. “Don’t be such a . . .” she glanced at her kids, “frickin’ Eeyore.”

  “I’m telling the truth.” Drew felt a wash of self-pity. Even though she knew Rachel would tell her to suck it up. Her parents would just look at her uncomprehendingly. So marry somebody rich and quit chasing that Jonah guy, Killian would say.

  Chase wiped his nose on Rachel’s jeans. Rachel grimaced. “Go see Grandma Jean, you guys.” Quincy stood up and grabbed her brother, hauling him off with her. Rachel stopped mashing. “Are you saying you don’t know any working musicians who play worse than you?”

  “Yeah. Of course.” Drew can name a dozen offhand, and that doesn’t include the pop stars who sing off key when they’re not autotuned.

  “Somebody is always going to be better than you, Drew. That’s true for everybody.” Rachel smiled with the kind of benediction Drew craved. “But all I know is when you play, I get goose bumps. And I don’t get goose bumps for pretenders. If they won’t let you play the viola, you can always quit. Talent doesn’t mean anything if you don’t use it.”

  “What’s your talent?” Drew asked curiously, and immediately regretted it. Rachel took it wrong. A shadow fell over her sister’s face.

  Rachel attacked the potatoes with renewed vigor, fluffing them into mounds that almost looked like whipped cream. “See what I mean?” her sister said. “Talent means nothing if you don’t use it. Or lose it.”

  • • •

  Now Drew follows her sister into the kitchen. The old yellow countertops and decrepit cupboards are gone. The kitchen’s been remodeled, expanses of tawny spotted granite with soft spotlights on the big gas stove and farmhouse sink. The large island is covered in letters from school, flyers about bake sales, and library books. The kitchen smells like marinara sauce, tomatoes and basil and garlic, coming from a bubbling Crock-Pot plugged in next to the coffeemaker.

  Tom sits at the island, eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. “Drew!” He stands up, enfolds her in his arms. “Good to see you.”

  “Tom, why are you eating cereal? It’s almost six o’clock.” Rachel hangs her purse on a hook by the door. She holds out her hand and Drew gives her her purse, too. She puts the samurai book, in its bag, on the counter.

  “If it’s good enough for breakfast, it’s good enough for dinner.” He takes another bite.

  “But I’m making dinner.” Rachel points at the Crock-Pot. “If that was a snake, it would’ve bit you.”

  “Oh. Didn’t see it.” Tom shrugs. “Don’t worry. This can be a snack. I’ll digest this in six seconds, and then I’ll eat your spaghetti.”

  This makes Rachel smile. “Okay, then.”

  Drew sits next to Tom, the stool squeaking. “Six seconds? What’s that mean?”

  Rachel waves her hand in the air. “It’s something Chase used to say when he was a little boy. He’d get full at dinner, and we’d say, O
h, you better wait a while for dessert. He’d say, Don’t worry. I digest food in six seconds.”

  Inside joke. “Oh.” Drew wonders what other family-specific sayings they have. She can’t remember any that she and Rachel had, from growing up. Maybe it takes a certain kind of family to have those.

  She watches her sister bend to kiss Tom, how his hand still grabs the back of Rachel’s head to pull her in close. Tom the Steady. She still doesn’t know her brother-in-law very well, even after all these years. She knows he’s friendly, and that you should never mention foreign cars around him—the man was obsessed with Corvettes and Mustangs and American-made engines. He keeps an old project Corvette in the garage that he’d been working on for the last decade.

  “He’s so boring,” Drew had said to Rachel after she and Tom first started dating. Drew was fourteen, Rachel eighteen. “A football-watching, American beer–drinking, early-to-bed early-to-rise typical . . . dude.” She trailed off for lack of a more descriptive word. She pointed at Tom’s old New Orleans Saints T-shirt that Rachel was wearing as a maternity shirt. “You’re going to turn into one of them.”

  “One of who?” Rachel asked.

  “One of those super-boring suburban PTA moms.” Drew shuddered. “You’ll be old before you even have a chance to do anything with your life.” Drew wanted adventure. She wanted to be free of her family. Of all obligations.

  “I am doing something with my life.” Rachel patted her belly. “Just in a different order than I thought I would. I’ll finish college when this one’s in school. I’ll only be twenty-three.”

  Twenty-three seemed ancient. Drew persisted. “Has he ever been in an art museum, or to the symphony? Or does he just watch football and drink beer?”

  “Of course.” Rachel’s neck got blotchy. She was getting angry. “He’s not morally opposed to culture.”

  Drew should have backed off, but she kept going. She was kind of prone to doing that. “I think he’s just pretending to like the stuff you like,” she said. “Men do that. Then you marry them and you find out that you’ve been tricked.”

  “Where on earth did you get that?” Rachel asked.

  Drew stared hard at her. “Um, to begin with, Mom and Dad.” She didn’t know this for certain, but she imagined it couldn’t have happened any other way. Killian must have pretended to be far nicer than he actually was, for Hikari to agree to marry him.

  “Well, Tom’s not like that,” Rachel said. “He’s the worst liar you’ll ever meet. Even white lies. He turns red.”

  Remembering this, her naive snobbery, makes a flush creep up to Drew’s hairline. She’d followed her own advice for a while. Kept up with Jonah because she thought he was going places, clinging on to him like Yoda clinging on to Luke’s back as he did his thing, trying to shoehorn her way into his life and music. Tried out some accountants and engineers, but never clicked with them. Rejected other guys because they were too low on their job totem pole—she wanted someone who was already successful, not somebody who might be successful. Because you couldn’t count on “might be.”

  Now all her friends have children or partners, or both, had moved to the Valley or other distant suburbs. Drew could use a dose of something true and solid in her life. It’s worked for Rachel.

  Drew leans over to her sister’s husband. “Hey, Tom.”

  “Hey, Drew.” He leans toward her, too. At forty, he’s still got all his hair, and his active job’s mostly kept away any middle-aged spread. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and faded flannel pajama pants decorated with snowmen. “What’s up?”

  “Do you know anybody I could, you know, go out with?” Drew leans her elbows on the counter. “Who doesn’t drink too much?”

  “So the only criteria are sobriety and a pulse. That shouldn’t be too hard.” Tom laughs, puts his bowl in the dishwasher.

  Rachel shakes her head and pulls off the Crock-Pot lid, stirs the contents. “Drew, you live in L.A. How can you date someone here?”

  “I’ve tapped out the L.A. dating market. I’m too old.” Drew takes a paper napkin out of the chrome holder and folds it diagonally. Her heart pounds. She looks at Tom’s kind face and decides what the hell. Just tell the truth. “Besides, my employer kind of quit on me. The shop’s closing.” She keeps her gaze on the napkin, folding and refolding it until it forms a crane, or a semblance of one.

  Tom clucks sympathetically. “Oh man. That’s tough. I’m sorry.”

  Rachel drops the Crock-Pot lid with a clang. “Drew! You just told me work was going fine.”

  “My work was going fine. The business wasn’t.” Wetness springs into her eyes and she wipes at them, embarrassed. Rachel purses her lips and puts her hands on her hips. Drew knows what she’s thinking. Rachel figured out decades ago that Drew often cried just to get attention, even when she didn’t do it on purpose. When she was tiny, Drew would make huge fusses over tiny scrapes, just so Hikari would comfort her. She made up nightmares and monsters when she couldn’t sleep, so Rachel would let her sleep with her. And truthfully, Drew’s feeling a teensy bit sorry for herself. It’d be nice if someone could put a metaphorical Band-Aid on her. Tom obliges, patting her hand, which only makes Drew even more teary.

  Rachel takes out a large pot and fills it with water, shaking her head all the while. “I knew that woman was a weirdo flake. I never trusted her. Do you have something else lined up? Did you know she would do this?”

  Drew shakes her head back. Of course Rachel saw this coming. When Drew first took the job, Rachel had asked dozens of questions. How long had the woman been grooming dogs? Never. What was different about this business? It’s cute. It’s called Dogwarts. Does she provide benefits? No. And on and on until Rachel drove her point like a stake into Drew—that Drew was an ignorant fool who would never succeed at anything. Not that she said that in those words, exactly. Or that Drew had done anything except give her one-word answers and nod. She tried hard not to fight with Rachel.

  Drew should have seen the signs. She should have gotten a job that went somewhere ages ago. But there were always the music gigs. And the fact that their father gave her a generous Christmas check every year that filled in the income gaps. Drew had grown comfortable in her stasis.

  Tom smiles at her, his eyes crinkling. “Well. You can stay here as long as you want. We have that guest room. We’d love to have you. I feel like we never see you.”

  Drew’s head lifts. She hadn’t considered staying more than a night. Rachel swivels her head to stare at Tom. The Rachel Glare. Tom doesn’t backtrack, just lifts his eyebrows back at her sister. Drew stifles a smile. How lucky is her sister that she found a man who will actually stand up to her? Because even though Drew loves Rachel, she has to admit that Rachel can be a teensy bit stubborn. Rachel looks down. “Tom, I’ve been having trouble with the TV remote in our bedroom. Can you show me?”

  Tom shrugs, stands. “Sure.” Rachel’s already moving toward the living room.

  KISO-FUKUSHIMA TOWN

  SHINANO PROVINCE

  HONSHU, JAPAN

  Summer 1169

  Tomoe weighed each green bean in the palm of her hand for heaviness before attempting to twist it free. If it did not give way immediately, she knew it was not ready. Such fruits were good only when the mother plant released them.

  She knelt in the crumbling black earth, feeling in the leaves for the beans she couldn’t see. The morning was still cool, the heat not yet oppressive. This was sixteen-year-old Tomoe’s favorite time of day, and often she would arise in the first wan light to begin her chores. “Tomoe is more reliable than our rooster,” Kaneto would say. He was the second one awake, going out to oversee the rice paddies. Tomoe always began her work with feeding the chickens and helping her mother start breakfast. Then it was time to wake up the boys. She saved the garden she’d attended as a child for last, weeding and watering, deadheading blossoms and picking ripe veg
etables.

  This morning, Kanehira and her parents had gone to town, taking eggs and some rice to barter for silk—Chizuru wanted to make them both kimonos. Yoshinaka was already out in their rice fields, supervising the dozen or so workers Kaneto employed.

  The clop-clop of hooves caused her to look up. Yoshinaka dismounted and came at her, full-force. “Tomoe! You’ll never guess.”

  Tomoe stood, upsetting her basket of beans all over the ground. She knelt again and picked them up. “What’s wrong?” she said, annoyed.

  Yoshinaka grinned, his eyes big with excitement. “Come on! I have to show you something.”

  She looked at the rows of beans she had not yet touched. “I cannot. I am not done.”

  “Tomoe. This is important.” His voice took on an authoritative, deepening tone. Tomoe had overheard Yoshinaka bragging to her brother that he already had hair in places where only men had hair. The thought made her blush. Now Yoshinaka took her hand, his tone softening. “Come with me. Please. I promise you’ll like it. And bring that basket.”

  She allowed him to lead her to the horse, a sturdy brown mare the boy was riding bareback. An excited, nervous giggle escaped her. Where were they going? Was he trying to get her in some deserted bushes? She trusted him, though. “All right. But can’t you give me at least a hint?”

  He laced his fingers together to give her a foot boost. “No.” He scrambled up behind her. His growing strength surprised her. She could feel the strong muscles in his thighs, alongside her buttocks, squeezing her into place. Yoshinaka wrapped his arms around her and kicked the mare. She put the basket between her legs and held on to the horse’s mane.

  The breeze whipped through Tomoe’s hair and she enjoyed the sensation on her face. It blew back onto Yoshinaka’s face, fanning over his head like a bolt of silk. “It’s like I blindfolded you,” she said teasingly.